Matt Gurney: Santa Barbara shooting was definition of 'preventable.' Six people died anyway

The most depressing part of last weekend’s mass shooting in Santa Barbara, California, other than the six dead and 13 wounded, of course, is the bigger implication. After every shooting incident like this one, we are quick to demand answers as to how this has happened, and suggest how things could have gone better. But this latest rampage was the textbook example of a shooting that was completely preventable. Everything was in place here to stop it. Everyone had done the right thing. And six people died, anyway. This may be the time in the collective conversation where we acknowledge that there’s sometimes no real defence against such evil acts.

Consider what we know so far. The alleged shooter, Elliot Rodger, had some history of mental health issues, and was reportedly under the care of therapists. Local police officials were aware of his issues and had visited him in the past to check on his wellbeing and mental state. His family was actively involved in his life, and was aware of his troubled state, and were trying to help him — indeed, in the hours before the shooting, they were apparently frantically trying to prevent the incident. He lived in a state with reasonably tight gun-control regulations, and though he did own firearms, they were reportedly properly registered and did not have the dreaded high-capacity magazines.

Considered against the background of the sad history of such incidents, that’s actually an astonishing set of facts. Normally, in the aftermath of such a shooting, we quickly realize that the shooter had been slowly building up to a violent eruption, but was doing so quietly. They’d avoid contact with their families, be largely unknown to police and mental-health-care experts, and amass an arsenal, sometimes using illegal channels. Not so here. Everything we count on to be our early warning system against this kind of incident — families, mental health experts, police, gun control systems — were in play. They all failed.

That is deeply disappointing, and there will no doubt be some tough questions. Did Rodger’s reported mental-health challenges (his family says he had high-functioning Aspergers, which is on the spectrum of autism disorders) provide authorities with sufficient cause to seize his firearms? If officers had probed a bit deeper, would they have uncovered his plot? Was there an opportunity for people who saw his manifesto and his online videos, where he lays bare his deep anger and hurt to the world, and explicitly promises retribution, to alert authorities? If so, did anyone try?

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Time will tell. But in the meantime, this tragedy should serve as a harsh lesson for all of us. There is simply no reasonable defence against a deranged individual, such as Rodgers is alleged to have been, who is determined to do harm to others, whether the roommates he reportedly knifed to death or the random strangers he allegedly shot. Limiting access to firearms may help. Engaged families may help. Informed police forces and alerted mental-health care professionals may be able to intervene. But sometimes, terrible things just happen, and there isn’t a law or regulation that we could ever write that will change that reality.

That’s not the answer anyone wants. It’s human nature to want to believe that we can make tragedies like this go away. And in many instances, such events are certainly avoidable. But not all. The knee-jerk reactions to events like this obscure the deeper truth: While the percentage of murder victims killed in spree shootings had ticked slightly upward in the United States over the last several decades, that has been against an overall background of declining homicide rates. America is safer now than it has been in years — the most recent information available to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in fact, suggests that an American is less likely to be murdered now than at any time since the John F. Kennedy administration.

That’s not a reason to not try to do better. While guns will always be a part of American life, there’s probably plenty of room to improve how authorities respond when someone believed to be suffering from mental health issues is known to own firearms. And improved early warning over social media platforms, where spree killers seem keen to boast of their anger and plots, could make a big difference.

But there is no silver bullet here. There are no magical solutions. The world will always be a dangerous place. The good news is that it’s not as dangerous as it once was, and not nearly as dangerous as we often seem to think it is.